Well, the big change has happened at CBS Evening News. Under the new management of Bari Weiss, Tony Dokoupil has been announced as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. This has immediately upset all of the right people, by which I mean the people on the left who think of Walter Cronkite or maybe Dan Rather as the high point of serious news anchors.
I’ve made this point before, but Walter Cronkite would have been out on his ass if what he was doing as CBS anchor had been known outside CBS back in the day.
After Cronkite had belatedly turned against LBJ’s Vietnam War, he met privately with Robert Kennedy. “You must announce your intention to run against Johnson, to show people there will be a way out of this terrible war,” he said in Kennedy’s Senate office. Soon afterward, Cronkite got an exclusive interview in which Kennedy left the door open for a possible run—the very candidacy that the anchor had urged him to undertake. (Kennedy announced three days later.) I am shaking my head at the spectacle of a network anchor secretly urging a politician to mount a White House campaign—and then interviewing him about that very question. This was duplicitous, a major breach of trust…
In what would likely be deemed a firing offense today, Cronkite blatantly manipulated an interview with LBJ shortly before Johnson died. According to Brinkley, his producer spliced the footage in unflattering ways, reshooting Cronkite asking the questions so it appeared that he was nodding or raising his eyebrows in disgust when Johnson talked about Vietnam. LBJ saw a rough cut and pronounced it “dirty pool”; I would call it a video version of lying. Under pressure from the former president’s team, CBS undid the misleading editing, so the public never learned of the deception.
The fact that Walter Cronkite was a lying, manipulative left-wing hack who never deserved his reputation as a trusted newsman or that Dan Rather ended his career with a bogus story aimed at taking out a Republican presidential candidate never matters to such people. And things didn’t improve much by putting Katie Couric in the chair. She’s yet another progressive doing her best to bring a hatchet to any interview with a conservative.
But in the good old days, no one was around to contradict whatever story liberals wanted to tell (including about themselves). That’s what they miss the most about the golden age.
In any case, Dokoupil starts his tenure in the chair today and he put out a video yesterday announcing a new approach.
“On too many stories, the press has missed the story. Because we’ve taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites, and not enough on you.”
That changes now. The new CBS Evening News… pic.twitter.com/NKdvRJjYCS
— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 1, 2026
What does all of this mean? Well, I think it clearly means that CBS won’t continue moving along the same progressive rut, running in 3rd place among the big broadcast news outlets and dreaming of the glory days of Walter Cronkite. It means the person in charge recognizes there’s a legitimate reason why so many people have tuned CBS out and fixing that won’t happen overnight or by accident. As Dokoupil puts it, “on too many stories the press missed the story.”
Yes, and most of the big ones I can think of off the top of my head were all stories where progressives were more invested in lying to people than reporting. That was true of the Russia collusion scandal, the endless reporting on the Steele dossier, Hunter Biden’s laptop, China obvious coverup of the origins of COVID-19, the effectiveness (and impact on kids) of closing schools, that defunding the police was a good idea, that critical race theory wasn’t a factor in schools or corporations, that DEI was based on science, or the biggest lie in recently political history: That Joe Biden was sharp as a tack and capable of leading for another four years.
I’m not saying that every story the media got wrong was about placing left-wing politics before evidence, but it was true in most cases. And that’s how you lose your credibility. It does become clear to people over time that the news isn’t about reporting the facts any more, it’s about doing PR for one political team (or doing damage to the other team wherever possible). That’s why no one believes the major news outlets anymore. They’d rather be wrong and on the “right side of history” than be right if being right meant agreeing with the right.
In fact, the whole reason the left dislikes Dokoupil in particular is that he shocked them by disagreeing with one of their patron saints on camera.
In 2024, he drew criticism for giving a tense interview with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in which he grilled the writer on Israel’s right to exist. During the interview, he said Coates’ book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, The Message, wouldn’t be out of place in the “backpack of an extremist.” CBS News executives said the interview didn’t meet editorial standards.
There was nothing wrong with the interview except that CBS felt the need to ride to Coates rescue after he found himself facing difficult questions for once. (Coates then went on to do half-a-dozen progressive shows where he was asked about the interview and given a chance to whine about his treatment by CBS.)
Anyway, I think Weiss is going to give it a real try to set things right and some people will notice the difference and give it a chance, while others take every opportunity to pronounce her effort a failure. The reality is that the left-wing audience will disappear the moment they are challenged and it will take a long time to earn trust from a right-wing audience that has been burned for 50 years. I don’t think that spells ratings gold for CBS News in the short term. I just hope Weiss is given time to prove the change of course is worth it in the longer term.
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